Compromise
by Wallace
Summary: M has never been one of his women.


**Title:** Compromise.

**Author:** Wallace (wal_lace@hotmail.com)

**Authors Note:** Written in forty-five minutes after a boring day at work. I was supposed to be writing the first chapter of a crossover, but somehow ended up channelling M.

**Continuity:** No spoilers, not for anyone who knows anything about James Bond. M here is, of course, the Judi Dench version, but otherwise this could be set anytime really.

M has been with 'Six' for close to forty years. She joined as a secretary, back when that was almost all a woman was allowed to do in SIS, and worked her way up slowly and painfully, taking through sheer competence and brute ambition what others were being given for having gone to the right schools, and for having joined the right clubs, and for being male. She forced equality on the organisation, reshaping it from the bottom up.

And, always, there was James Bond, hovering at the edge of her life, his very existence a mockery of her ambitions.

When M joined, secretaries at MI6 could be divided simply into those that had and had not slept with James Bond. M was one of the latter, back when she began. Back then Bond was bigger than he is now, his shoulders and face broader. He talked with a strong Scots accent, but Bond has always been a chameleon. The man to whom she gives orders today is, if anything, slightly taller. He looks older, but not by forty years; he looks similar, but not identical.

There have been others, M knows, at least three more over the course of her career. Where they come from and where they go no one knows; nobody has ever looked into the face of James Bond and recognised there a young man with whom they trained, an old friend or lover. Because 007 is a constant, the most powerful weapon available to 'Six'. Maybe she did know him once; there were a couple of men she once knew who were about the right height, about the right build.

Or maybe it's the same man.

Bond is a legend, after all, and legends are by their nature immortal. The stories about him are never revealed to the public, but as many centre on his romantic conquests as on his triumphs in the field. The man has defied the most powerful governments in the world, has hunted down the most deadly assassins and triumphed repeatedly against impossible odds, and somehow he always seems to manage to find romance along the way.

No. Not romance. M knows that Bond is not a romantic. He has sex. He seduces women, and uses them coldly and brutally. And, if they're really lucky, they'll get to walk away afterwards.

When she was younger, she heard her fellow secretaries talking about him. They were never direct. In some ways it was almost as if they were talking of some kind of god, a creature that could not be named. James Bond swept down from his pedestal on high and pleasured them blind for a few brief days or months, and then moved on and forgot them instantly, no longer even troubled to flirt with them if they met in the corridors of Whitehall.

And they worshipped him for it.

He never tried to seduce M, never flirted with her in the corridors as he did with the other young women who worked for 'Six'. It was as if he somehow sensed her disdain for him, as if her feelings, hidden though they were, repelled him. She never spoke of them, or showed them, but a good seducer knows an impossible target when he sees one. And M had endeavoured to make herself an impossible target.

When she joined the Service, when she was accepted to a secretarial post because she had been to a good finishing school and her father had served in a good regiment, it had been in a time when Women's Lib meant something. Such things were not accepted in Whitehall, of course, but even then M was good at concealing the truth about herself. Nobody could see her ambition, her determination to bring equality to the world of espionage, just as nobody could see her contempt for the tall, rugged, beautiful man who stalked the corridors, just as nobody could see her cool intelligence that hid behind the mask of a quiet little Daddy's Girl.

But Bond saw her contempt, and never tried to seduce her. And she sometimes wonders at this, because if Bond can be said to love anything it is a challenge. And M was beautiful in those days, and much as she disliked the man and everything he stood for – all the chauvinism and brutality and misplaced idealism of the Empire that was already dying when she was born – she cannot deny that if he had asked her, she would not have been able to resist. She would have struggled, but ultimately she would have let him take her out to dinner, would have drunk vodka martinis with him and smiled and laughed and touched him, would have gone back to the flat he keeps but seldom uses – the flat that James Bond, whoever he really is, has kept since he officially left the Navy in which he never really served, at the end of the Second World War – and gone to his bed. And she would have been his for a few days or a few weeks, and then he would have gently ushered her out of his life, and never glanced at her again when they met in the corridors of Whitehall. And when the other secretaries gossiped – but discreetly – she would have smiled with them, and hinted at her own memories just as they hinted at theirs.

She sometimes wonders if the reason he never tried is because he knew what they would become. Bond has little respect for the women he beds; they are diversions to him, devices to pass the time. Some of them may earn his respect in other ways, some of them may prove as strong as him in their own manner – but always, when he looks at them, he sees a woman who once moaned beneath him first, and whatever else they might be second.

Bond respected her predecessor, M knows. He has very few friends in the Service, very few friends in life, but he respected the old Admiral. And because of that, he took orders from the man. And she sometimes wonders if he never seduced her because he saw her potential, saw what she might become before she even imagined the possibility.

Because Bond flirts with her now, just a little, and she has come to understand him too well to feel the old contempt, and the two of them have achieved equilibrium, and found a way to work together. She understands why he must live as he does, in order to be able to do the job that he does. And he? He sits in her office, insolence in his posture and his voice, and mocks her with gentle sarcasm, and seduces every young woman who crosses his path and then forgets them, and he takes her orders, and deep within he respects her as he has respected no other woman in his life.

She could not command him if she had been seduced by him. And he had not let himself attempt her seduction. And as she fought her way up through the organisation, modernising and revitalising it as she went, Bond has remained the same. His face, his build, his voice, these have all changed time and again, but it is always the same man. MI6 exists in the twenty-first century, and it works. It negotiates as much as it intrigues, assists more often than it assassinates. But there are times when a weapon from the past is needed, and that is when M calls the never-old man into her office, and gives him a target, and lets him go, knowing that whatever is left at the end of it, the threat they feared will be destroyed, and Bond will be alive, and at least one young woman will have died because of him, because of her.

He knew, she sometimes believes. He knew where she would be, one day. He saw her strength even before she did, he understood that she had what it took to sit in this office, behind this desk, and that nobody else in the organisation did.

He accepts her orders because he respects her. She gives them to him because – sometimes, somebody has to. Because there are times when a man with a gun is more effective than an army of negotiators. Because there are times when the women he seduces and abandons are an acceptable loss. And because she was never one of these women.

And there are times, after the missions, when she has to sign for a new identity or an unmarked grave for his latest conquest, that she thinks it would be better if she had been.


End file.
